Matthew Davidson (Stretta) has posted these videos, demonstrating a new instrument, the Arc, in action.

The Arc, made by the creators of the monome, is a high-end, hand-crafted high-resolution knob controller for electronic music.

Davidson’s first piece, soome, above, is an improvisation for piano, monome, arc and an application he created, grainstorm:

I’m using a hand-built arc prototype, generously on loan from tehn, who is very busy building and shipping monomes, dealing with the transition to serialosc required by the new edition and finalizing the arc firmware. I’m sure he’d prefer to be playing with the arc himself.

hardware: monome arc2 (knobs) monome64 (buttons)
software: grainstorm

The second video is a demonstration of stutter island – beat mangling software for the monome arc, designed for live remixing and dj-ing:

The final video takes a deeper look at grainstorm:

This video is a brief introduction to grainstorm, Davidson’s granular synthesis application for the monome arc:

Grainstorm has four independent buffers that can be controlled with the arc. Primarily, you use the arc to scroll through the buffer. A push turn gesture on the same encoder widens the window from which grains are drawn. This isn’t really evident in the video. A snapshot of various playback parameters can be stored on the grid monome where the it can be played like an instrument or sequenced with the on board sequencer. You can record live audio into the buffer, or load audio from disk. Meaningful support for the arc4 would be fairly easy.

Resources:

• monome.org
• Stretta
• Stretta Samples on SoundCloud